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A New Toy

Still working diligently on the latest novel, a middle grade fantasy that could be the best thing I’ve written or the worst, as is always the case when I’m this close to it, as well as plugging away on a new short story, but otherwise life goes on as life does.  My daughter finishes up her last week at preschool next week, and then it’s on to kindergarten.  Sniff.  Got the first part of the advance on my first novel, which was nice.  Most of it went in the bank or to retire some minor debt, but I did take part of it to buy a nice used pop-up tent trailer (pictured there on the right).  We love camping and hiking, especially in the Redwoods, but we wanted a little step up in comfort without breaking the bank.  Should be fun this summer. 

When you realize you’ve made more money on half your advance than you made on the three dozen short stories you sold up to that point, it really does drive home where the bulk of the writing time must go if you have any goal of making a living at writing fiction at some point.  I won’t give up short stories for lots of reasons, but it certainly makes it easier to justify to the family all those hours I spend in my office by myself when I can point to a check with commas in it.  (Well, let’s not get carried away, it only had one comma in it, but one comma is a very nice thing when you’ve been used to worrying about how many cents a word you’re getting paid for your work.)

Good stuff this week:

  • “Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public’s interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.”  From “Michael Crichton, Vindicated.”  My own feelings the last year on the mainstream media has gone from indifference to outright disdain, so I couldn’t agree with him more.  What passes for news is now just poor entertainment, and if I want entertainment, I can do a lot better.
  • Advantage Obama.  Seriously, folks, all this talk of Obama losing the election is just nonsense.  An unpopular war, a President with sky-high disapproval ratings, a faltering economy, and a Republican candidate who morphed into Bush III to get the nomination.  Obama will get a 10 point bounce in the polls over the next month (as Clinton pulls out) and — unless he somehow blows it big time — trounce McCain in the electoral college with 300+ votes.   It’s not even going to be close.  If he’s ahead now in the polls, after a contentious primary, McCain is in big, big trouble.  Of course, Democrats could always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they’ve been prone to do, but I think the chances are slim this time. 
  • Oregon Web cams.  A great resource of Web cams all over Oregon.  I don’t know why I get so giddy looking at Web cams of places I’ve been, but I do. 
  • Head over to The First Book blog. Josh Emmons and his book, The Loss of Leon Meed, is profiled over there.  It’s our 20th installment in the series.  A snippet:  “I wrote a few books in my twenties and went through the motions of trying to get them published-querying agents, rubbing talismans-without any luck . . .”

Those Who Can, Teach

  • There’s nothing better than listening to an author you enjoy read his or her own work — if that author knows how to read for an audience.   I’m currently listening to Neil Gaiman’s M is for Magic on my MP3 player, and he really does bring his fiction to life.  Gotta love that English accent, too.   
  • If you’re a serious writer who needs help getting your craft to a publishable level, or even a professional writer whose career has stagnated, then you really should check out the workshops taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith here on the Oregon coast.  Every few years, they do a slate of workshops, and they’re in one of those phases now.  They’re pros, having made their living from their writing most of their adult lives, and so you’ll be learning from people who have actually walked the path.  I can’t recommend them enough.  Be forewarned, however:  they’re not for the faint of heart.  You should only consider attending if you’re serious about writing commercial fiction — and by commercial, I mean fiction aimed at reaching the widest audience possible.
  • Check out the The First Book blog.  Sara Hantz is up with her book, The Second Virginity of Suzy Green.  A snippet:  “I’d been writing chick-lit for a couple of years, when in November 2005 I decided to try a teen-lit. After writing 3 chapters I did what you’re not meant to do and started to send it to agents, to test the water. Ooops!!! That’ll teach me. The story seemed to hit the right nerve because straight away five agents asked for the full manuscript and six for partials.”

Minor Changes to The First Book Blog

Ward Cleaver

Up this week on The First Book:  Jenny Gardiner and her debut novel,
SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER.  Go read the interview.  Fun stuff.

The traffic has been steadily increasing on site, which is great for all the authors over there.  There’s no reason to do this unless it’s helping writers.  You may have noticed that I made some changes to the design.  There were some things that bothered me about the old design — the main one being that if you linked to an individual interview, you lost the sidebar.  So I switched over to this design and made a few other improvements, too.  Don’t worry, I don’t plan on being one of those obsessive types who changes the design every few months.  It really was for functional reasons.  When I came up with this idea, I wanted to keep it simple since I don’t have much free time as it is, but I still wanted to do something that would 1) help writers — my way of paying forward, 2) help keep me up to date with what publishers are coming out with these days, and 3) raise my own Internet profile in a way that wasn’t obnoxious.  I think it’s accomplished all three things, while providing interesting information for readers, writers, agents, and editors.

Other stuff:

  • My goal of writing 1000 words every day, no exceptions, has paid off big time; my productivity is back where it was before my Second Child Drop Off.  I wrote a post a while back on the differences between a project writer and a process writer, and it’s clear I’ve got be a process writer right now.  But man, the pages do add up when you’re cranking out three or four every day.  It feels good to be rolling again, and what’s really great is that I think I can even do better. 
  • If you’re a newly pregnant woman or know one who is, consider buying my friend Jodi Neelin’s little book, The Pregnasaurus.  It’s a great little book, funny, charming, and touching at the same time.  Think of it as a children’s book for adults.

Challenging My Excuses and Other Stuff

I decided I needed to do a reality check on whether my 50% drop in writing productivity since my son was born was really related to that event, or whether it’s just been a convenient excuse.  It’s true that finding time to write isn’t as easy as it used to be, and it’s true that life is just plain harder than it was before, but if I’m waiting for life to get easier, I have a feeling I’m going to be waiting a long time.  I needed to challenge my excuses and see how well they held up under more objective scrutiny.

So I set myself a new goal:  write 1000 words a day for a 100 days for a total of 100,000 words.  I decided I would try my best to hit 1000 words every day, but if I occasionally missed, I could do 2000 the next day to catch up.  The words could be novel or short story words, but they had to be fiction, and they had to be new. 

Well, the jury’s still out on whether I’ll meet the challenge, but I did 13 days for 13,000 words and only had to do a 2000 word day once.  During that time, not only did I work the full-time day job and do all the normal family and household/yard stuff, I also did all the following in that 13-day span:

  • Spent a day helping give my daughter a pony party (with a real pony!) for her fifth birthday
  • Went to the zoo with my family, eating up a Sunday
  • Took an afternoon off and went on a coastal hike with my sister, who was visiting from NY
  • Visited with my father for an afternoon and evening Saturday, who was visiting from Hawaii
  • Spent an afternoon and evening out at the coast guest-speaking at a writer’s workshop

So all in all, a busy time, not crazy-out-of-my-mind busy, but an ordinary level of busy for how my life is now.  What did I learn?  I learned that through it all, I could write at the pace I’d like to be at — a pace that will help keep me in track with my goals.  There were quite a few days where I was writing late in my office, dead tired, but I was able to write.  I produced pages.  I learned that I could write and still have a social life, still have time for books, still have time for movies.  I also learned that through it all, I still wasted gobs of time. 

That last lesson was the most painful. 

So yes, life is harder, no denying that.  But the time is there.  It just has to be used more effectively, which is what I’m focusing on now. 

A few other things:

  • Speaking of that writer’s workshop, I had a great time out there on the Oregon coast.  I have lots of experience talking to groups because of my day job, but I was much more self-conscious talking about writing, but the writers seemed to get something out of it.  Mainly, it was about how to switch agents from a newer writer’s point of view (and from one who hadn’t even sold a novel at the time), but the the conversation ranged all over the place.  Great fun.  And I learned a few things that made it worth the trip all by itself. 
  • John Scalzi has some great thoughts on why YA science fiction/fantasy sells better than adult science fiction/fantasy — and also why writers in YA are paid more than their adult-writing counterparts.  Here and Here.  Great stuff. 
  • Now I know why I’m not happy all the time.  I should be a church-going conservative.  Hmm  . . . Nah . . .
  • Along those lines, a private Einstein letter confirms he really was an atheist, and that he only spoke of God as a metaphor for the laws of nature.  I wish he would have been more clear when he was alive on this matter, as Richard Dawkins has done, but it’s nice to know.  
  • Check out The First Book.  Two new writers up there since the last time I posted, both with great stories about their journeys to being published authors.  How long will I keep doing this?  Who knows, but I’m going to try to keep it up until I’ve done at least 100 of them — which should be about the time my own first book comes out.

Finally, a picture that explains why no matter how many places I visit in this great country of ours, I just can’t get myself to live anywhere else.  This is Cascade Head, where I recently hiked with my sister:

cascade-head2.jpg